Selective call messaging, such as paging messaging, involves transmitting a message or a page to an intended selective call receiver by radio frequency (RF) signals. The page is received from an originator at a selective call terminal and is encoded into a format recognizable by the receiver. A selective call address assigned to the receiver is added to the message to indicate the intended receiver. The message is then transmitted for reception within a selective call system coverage area in which the receiver is expected to be located.
Conventionally, information for tone, voice, numeric, and alphanumeric pages are received by the selective call terminal from remote devices via telephone audio modems or DTMF tone signalling. In addition, some pages are originated from information supplied to video display terminals (VDTs) coupled directly to the selective call terminal. The format of the signals received from the telephone and the VDTs are known to the selective call terminal and are compatible with the formatting of the selective call signals into known signalling formats.
With the advent of alphanumeric paging, the user is able to receive messages that are more detailed, thus more useful, than those received in tone, voice, or numeric pages. An alphanumeric message may, for example, contain information such as facsimiles, technical reports, data bases, etc. These types of alphanumeric messages, while informative, may be extremely lengthy. The length of the message is, however, limited by the ability of conventional selective call terminals to process pages that include very large amounts of information. This situation might arise, for example, if a number of files are sent from a computer via modem to the selective call terminal. In situations where the information sent to the selective call terminal is of excessive length and cannot be processed, the selective call terminal will only send a portion of the information to the selective call receiver. As a result, the user may receive an incomplete message or no message at all. This could create a problem if the user is unable to receive an important lengthy message in its entirety.
Thus, what is needed is a method and apparatus for combining submessages of a message to form the complete message.